On Tuesday July 12, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Neil Brown wrote: > > > > > > >Maybe it is worth repeating Al Viro's suggestion at this point. I > >don't have a reference but the idea was basically that if you open > >"/foo" and get filedescriptor N, then > > /proc/self/fds/N-meta > >is a directory which contains all the meta stuff for "/foo". > >Then it is trivial to get the 'meta' stuff given a filedescriptor and > >if you have a pathname, you can always get yourself a filedescriptor. > > > > > This sound like it might be cute, but filedescriptors are too heavy > weight for stat data accesses in quantity. > > In general, the whole file handle paradigm is too heavy for lightweight > files.
That may well be true, but is completely orthogonal to filesystem name semantics. If you find file descriptors too slow, come up with an alternate (I suspect you have in the reiser4 syscall, but I haven't looked at that yet), implement it in the VFS, and show the world benchmarks of real-world applications that go faster with this new interface. I doubt that you would then have a great deal of trouble in getting the interface accepted (some trouble of course as you will need to convince a few people, but numbers speak quite loudly). I suspect that there might need to be a new internal interface into filesystems, and filesystems which don't provide that will not get the same speed benefit, but that is perfectly acceptable. NeilBrown
